Well the scum bag spammers finally made me do it. I added captchas to the comments plugin in Vellum tonight. Up until now I had been using a simple blacklist of forbidden phrases and urls, and it had killed the majority of the spam quite nicely. Until Mr. "I'm not up to much today" started spamming the blog on a daily basis, always with different text, different ips and different urls to different scum bag products. So a black list was not going to cut it with him. manual removal didn't work , as the blog was always spammed again in a matter of hours. So hopefully the captchas will put paid to him. Time will tell. I apologize if the captchas annoy or inconvenience anyone, I'm not their greatest fan myself. But it was this or spend time everyday wiping off the spam.

For those who are interested in doing something similar themselves, my implementation is based on this recipe in the python cookbook